After reading many articles that suggest that the Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) has a lower Click-through Rate (CTR) than Google AdSense I decided to take it upon myself to test this out on one of my entertainment sites geared towards mature teens. My experience with these two ad publishers did not follow this trend that suggests AdSense has a higher CTR.

Click-through Rate
I’ve found that the average CTR for both YPN and AdSense were relatively similar. There are other factors that may effect these results such as my ad placements or audience but due to YPN’s higher Cost Per Click (CPC) it has been more profitable for me than AdSense. The average CTR was about 300 clicks per 1,000,000 impressions.

Relevance of Content
AdSense delivered better targeted ads but by setting categories for my highest trafficked pages I was able to further increase my CTR with YPN. Also, YPN showed mostly main brand ads my visitors were familiar with (not sure if this is good or not).

Comparative Data
So which made me more money? YPN averaged about $0.50 per click while AdSense averaged about $0.22 per click, and as I mentioned above the CTR was about the same. Below I listed some numbers I got from my comparison of the two ad networks:

Month 1
Earnings – Yahoo! made 38.6% more than Google
Y – Clicks: 308 | Impressions: 1,053,573
G – Clicks: 305 | Impressions: 1,072,797

Month 2
Earnings – Yahoo! made 39.8% more than Google
Y – Clicks: 322 | Impressions: 898,625
G – Clicks: 287 | Impressions: 1,069,110

Month 3
Earnings – Yahoo! made 17.6% more than Google
Y – Clicks: 462 | Impressions: 1,374,128
G – Clicks: 378 | Impressions: 1,212,344

This may not of been the best way to organize this data or compare both companies but it should give you a rough inclination that for the type of website these ads were on YPN was the better choice. Please forgive me if the calculations seem a little off, I feel I posted enough to give you all a general comparison. AdSense could totally work better for some of you than YPN, you’ll just have to try it out for yourself!

Neat little tool to preview how ads from various publishers will look:
Contextual Ads Preview and Comparison Tool